Do you think you hate spam? Really hate it? Naah. You only think you
do.

Sure, spam is so self-evidently annoying, time-consuming, costly and
sleazy that even congress-critters deplore it. But let's face it. Most
of us are really just irritated, members of a pretty non-exclusive
club. So were we, until a few weeks ago. Now we're mad as hell.
There's a difference.

About two months ago, we entered a new circle of spam-hell. We've been
spoofed. A certain percentage of the spam plague is going out under our
name. Not only do we have to receive all this crap, we are now
perceived as actually having sent it as well.

It started with a smattering of bounced mail notifications. Most of the
rejected messages were things sent under our personal names. They
contained virus attachments. We double-checked everything. We were not
infected, and were not sending the viruses. None of the recipients had
domain names we had even heard of, much less had correspondence with.
Our personal names were being spoofed into the From line by somebody
else, somewhere else.

Bad enough, but then things got much uglier. Celeste, as Postmaster of
stokely.com, began to get avalanches of undeliverable message
notifications. This time, the purported senders were not us, but bogus
people. Their names were prepended to the stokely.com domain. Day
after day this has gone on. It still continues, seemingly without end.
Celeste gets hundreds of bounces a day; these represent only the dead
addresses on the spammers' lists. We, of course, can't tell how much
actually gets through. It could easily be in the millions.

So what are "we" supposedly sending to these millions all over the
world? About what you'd expect. Pitches for Canadian drugs. Genital
enlargement schemes. The good old Nigerian Scam. If you see junk like
this supposedly sent by us, know that it wasn't. Just delete it.

Has our reputation suffered? In the large, possibly not much.
Old-timers to our site know that we stand for "making the world safer
for Unix system administrators," as it says on our splash page. They
know we will accept no payment or other consideration for recommending a
product, and that to ask for such compensated promotion is to guarantee
the product will NEVER get our recommendation. In short, we try to
shoot straight.

Perhaps for this reason, there has been actually very little mail to us
about this scourge, apart from the mailer bounces. But what about
people who are first-timers? How are they to tell that we aren't rank
hypocrites, preaching integrity on one side and running spamming scams
on the other? How about people who know we try to give straight advice,
and consequently open something they wouldn't normally, just because
it's "from" us?

That's ugly. But that was yesterday. Today things reached a brand-new
level of ugliness.

AOL has blacklisted our domain.

Yes, if we try to send you mail from stokely.com, and you have an AOL
address, it will be presumptively regarded as spam. You won't get it.
If this scourge doesn't stop, our domain could be added to more and more
blacklists. If this happens with your ISP, or on your server, we won't
be able to email you, at all, unless we gin up a new private domain
name.

That directly and qualitatively hurts our ability to conduct our
business and communicate with our friends. That smudges our
reputation. That wounds. That infuriates. As Celeste puts it, it's
like somebody has stolen your identity and is torturing little animals
in your name.

That's why we are almost certainly madder at the spammers than you could
be in your wildest dreams. It's unlikely, but not impossible, that we
will ever find out the identities of the pustular creeps doing this to
us. But we might. The first and last piece of advice I'd give them is
this: "You have just won a free trip, punks. Visualize an Intensive
Care Unit."

But that's about getting mad, not getting even. We are talking to some
heavy hitters about what we can do to combat this (early consensus:
"You're hosed.") We know we are not alone; some other outstanding
domains have been sullied by spam-spoofing as well. All ideas are
welcome. We'll share what we find out. But if you are on AOL, please
understand that we might not be able to thank you personally for awhile.